CoreTraining
A step-by-step guide for meditative living.
Prefer to Listen to this article instead? Please note there is a 50-second Introduction before “Having a Conscious Experience.”
Having A Conscious Experience
Our conscious experience is like an ocean. We are familiar with waves and the animals that live near the surface. We have some knowledge of what happens in the depths. The ocean floor is a great mystery. It is always changing – the waves of the surface change moment by moment in ways that are easy to see. The surface and depths exchange with each other constantly, too. It is a seamless whole that, nonetheless, has many distinct elements and features. Importantly, whether the ocean is shallow and warm, deep and cold, wild and stormy, or perfectly still – it’s all wet. The quality of ‘wetness’ is universal to the water of the ocean, and so all aspects of our experience share the ‘wetness’ of consciousness.
In the YourTurn CoreTraining, we engage practices that allow us to explore our ocean. We break this up into six zones of conscious experience in meditative living: action, thought, emotion, perception, luminous witness, and non-dual. Just like divers exploring the ocean, we start at the surface with actions and descend to a non-dual experience. We also understand that the surface can’t exist without everything beneath it being there first. Over time we understand that the flow of consciousness is happening in every direction and combination simultaneously.
Our lived experience relies upon and emerges from the “deeper” zones. It is critically important to understand that we only see what is already here; we do not acquire anything new. First, this facilitates the process by removing self-imposed obstructions. Second, because looking for something in the wrong place makes it impossible to find.
Each moment is distinct and unique, with our minds stitching together thousands of discrete moments each second like the frames of a film. The practices of the CoreTraining teach us how to perceive more frames per second in more detail. By doing so, we can locate areas where we can make empowered choices that influence the waves of the world. We get to choose who we want to be.
The “Current I”
As mentioned above, the real power of meditative living is the capacity to choose who we want to be. We refer to the “Who I am right now” as the “Current I.” The Current I is the temporary individuality, or complex whole, emerging from different combinations of what we are experiencing and the meaning those experiences have to us.
The Current I is similar to the general idea of “ego” with two major exceptions.
- It is an organizing force that supports survival, not an entity trying to survive.
- It is momentary and circumstantial, not enduring and evolving.
The Current I is a pattern of meaning-making, behavior, and self-reflection. There are two types of Current I, conditioned and chosen.
Conditioned I
A “Conditioned I” emerges without any conscious intervention. By extension, it has preferences, emotions, thoughts, behaviors, impulses, and actions that are reactionary based on unconscious patterns imposed on it by life experience.
Thankfully, we all have many conditioned I patterns that operate most of life. A conditioned I can be extremely skillful and serve our lives very well most of the time. One way to understand the objective of meditative living is to have all of our conditioned I align with Who We Want To Be and the values we choose.
Chosen I
A “Chosen I” emerges when we consciously organize and identify with mental objects to adopt an individuality with the preferences, emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and actions we understand as the most beneficial.
We may do this for a period of time to remedy a conditioned I that is outdated or otherwise misaligned with Who We Want To Be.
We may also make it a goal to always engage in life as a Chosen I as a preferred form of freedom.
Depth in Consciousness is Fluid
Various factors influence the zones included in the consciousness experience in which a “Current I” operates. A few of the biggest influences are:
- How powerful any Current I’s intention is to “see through” how it organizes an identity
- How willing the Current I is to believe that it is, in fact, a construct of different elements instead of an agent constructing the experiences
- How much capacity does the Current I have for sensory/emotional intensity?
- Sensory intensity increases the force of conditioned patterning, “collapsing” the system into increasingly smaller feedback loops. This “lifts” us up in the zones. In extreme cases, perhaps all the way up to action, limiting access even to our thoughts. This is what happens when we “get triggered” or have some other kind of trauma response.
- What kind of experience and practice does the “Current I” have in meditative living?
The fluid depth of the Current I is how we understand why we can think, act, and speak so differently in different contexts. It also explains how, at times, it seems as though we aren’t “making any progress.”
What do we see in each zone?
Action
The Action zone is the home of everything we do or say and experience others saying and doing. It is the physical world around us and our engagement with it.
When we are in the action zone, we see what others are doing and saying and notice ourselves doing and saying things. Our experience of thinking is dominated by what we have said or done or what we will/need/want to say or do.
We may have difficulty regulating our behavior and may find ourselves repeating the same situations.
Thought
The Thought zone is the home of our most refined, detailed, and distinct meaning-making tools. This is where our collected facts about the universe apply specific meaning to specific actions.
As meaning/action intersect (with a strong influence from the Emotion Zone), impulses are generated. Impulses are powerful forces designed to generate actions in response to our preferences. We will discuss preferences further in the Emotion Zone.
When we are in the thought zone, we can exert much control over what we do and say. However, this control can require significant effort as the influence of the currents from the emotion zone is very difficult to identify or regulate.
Thoughts <> Impulses <> Actions is a dynamic triangle in consciousness that we actively work with to transform our lives through the practices of “Breath Texture,” “Deconstructing Impulses,” and “Choosing Trailheads.”
Emotion
The Emotion Zone is a transition zone between what is readily available to “me” and what is “unconscious.” It is where the generalized, complex forms of pattern recognition take place. The primary function of the pattern recognition process is to make quick, powerful energies move through the body in service to our preferences.
The term preferences refers to the basic judgments of like, dislike, and neutrality. In other words, preferences answer:
- Do I care about this?
- Do I want more of this?
- Do I want less of this?
We accumulate patterns of behavior that filter out the choices we have available to us as a function of complex, higher-order efficiency. These behaviors interact with emotions and preferences to provide the basic scaffolding for our thoughts, impulses, and actions. The strength of the emotional current dictates the power of an impulse, and the strength of a preference dictates the power of an emotional current.
When we are in the Emotion Zone we are able to clearly articulate and understand our preferences, emotional reactions, and patterns of behavior. As we “descend” through this zone, we become increasingly capable of observing emotional flows dispassionately. This reduces the power of impulse, creates space to intentionally activate energetic currents, and enables the re-writing of our behaviors.
Emotion <> Preference <> Behavior is a dynamic triangle in consciousness that we actively work with in the “Ionizing the Field” and “Free Presence” practices.
Perception
The Perception zone is the home of mental objects. Any experience that can be perceived in any zone is a mental object. These mental objects can be visualized as bubbles in the water. For example, there are bubbles of preferences, emotions, thoughts, impulses, observed actions, memories, sights, sounds, smells, etc. Each is its own point in a great, interconnected web of relationships to the whole, including the changes of the following moment. In fact, an entire past moment becomes a bubble full of other bubbles in the present moment.
Meaning is applied to the observed changes, and a force organizes the various mental objects according to that meaning to make coherent stories. The result of this force is a momentary individuality called a Current I.
There are two kinds of Current I: conditioned and chosen.
- A Conditioned I is a Current I that emerges from the unintentional, habitual identification with certain patterns of mental objects.
- A Chosen I is a Current I that emerges from the intentional, temporary identification with mental objects in service to a specific way of being.
Perception <> Meaning <> Individuality is the third and most foundational dynamic triangle of individual experience. In the CoreTraining, “Deconstructing I” and “Seeing the Current I” are practices to strengthen our ability to:
- Sharpen our perception of mental objects.
- Influence the organizational force so that our emotions, thoughts, and actions are based on a Chosen I.
Luminous Witness
The Luminous Witness zone is the conscious experience of an unchanging basis that has the capacity to perceive even the organization of individuality. This is the zone of the Higher Self and all of its benefits, notably goodness, bliss, and permanence.
Connecting to this depth of consciousness at will, consciously recalling it in our daily life, and relying on it as an unconditioned space to observe the rest of our experience when needed is extremely empowering. Over time, we are able to stabilize a persistent experience of Witnessing and use this Higher Self-perspective as a source of wisdom in restructuring our lives.
“Perfect Mirror Meditation” and “30,000-foot view” are the CoreTraining practices operating at this depth.
Non-Dual
Over time, we realize that the quality of luminous witnessing only arises in conjunction with other mental objects. This reveals that the only thing we can know is our experience of Consciousness and that everything co-creates everything else. With this recognition, we become further empowered to decide what rubric we apply to the meaning-making process behind the creation of our Current I. By extension, our capacity to consciously relate to preferences and impulses increases. At this depth, we can live according to our chosen values and have the skill to reprogram any aspect of our individual experience with relative ease.
“Co-creating” and “Receiving” facilitate familiarization with this zone.
What is the flow of a moment?
The below diagram provides a rough representation of the relationship and energy flow between the elements discussed in the zones for your contemplation. For training purposes, we divide the work into zones and isolate chunks of experience to engage with. In reality, it’s all happening simultaneously with mutual influence.
For example, impulses feed into actions, and actions feed impulses. At the same time, the changes and actions created are given meaning and identity, resulting in preferences. Those preferences are simultaneously influenced by the thoughts and emotions that arose from the feedback actions provided to the impulse and, through that, behavior.
The inner feedback loop enclosing actions back to the emergence of preferences shows the nested sphere of experiences that makes up the “Current I.” The larger feedback loop enclosing the entire moment represents what constitutes the “Higher Self.” The exterior of the diagram, indicated by action, perception, and witness extending beyond the edges of the “Higher Self,” represents the non-dual experience.
Please consider returning to this diagram often as you engage in a meditative life. At different points in time, it will mean different things to you. More importantly, it will stimulate your inquiry into Consciousness. Sincerely investigating your experience is all that is required to unlock your power and live a flourishing life.
